


A Beginning, Once and for All

by FrodaB



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-20
Updated: 2012-03-20
Packaged: 2017-11-02 06:58:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/366212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrodaB/pseuds/FrodaB
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end is the beginning. An ME3 fix-it fic. Major ME3 spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Beginning, Once and for All

She took a breath.

This wouldn't normally be a big deal, but somehow, that breath was _everything_.

_\- it down, take it down!_

_Clear out this area!_

She took another breath. Progress – two breaths, two painful breaths. Her body felt broken.

_-urvivors?_

_Doubt it._

A third breath, and she felt like she had this breathing thing down. The body thing, not so much. Unable to move, unable to see, something pinning her down, black and red, blood and smoke. No use worrying now.

If they needed help, she couldn't help them. Breathing was all she could do, and by God, that's what she intended to keep doing.

At least, until she could find out what the hell had happened.

_-found something!_

_Found what?_

_I think it's – Shepard..._

She was breathing, had lost track of how many breaths. There was no sense of time in her little red-and-black bubble. She thought she could hear people's voices, though. Living people. 

Maybe that was enough. Maybe she could die now.

So when something started to move above her, it came as a shock. She cried out in fear and pain, thinking _oh, Harbinger is here for me, but I'm not at my best_...

But no, it was human hands who grabbed her upper arms, pulled her carefully out of the rubble – wait, where was she? It was hard to think with the hands, the voices, the light, the pain, and trying to keep breathing.

London, they'd gone to London. The Crucible, the Citadel, the Catalyst... Somehow, it didn't make any sense when she tried to put it all together. Maybe she had a concussion.

When they lifted her, she tried to tell them to stop – she didn't want to be moved, she wanted to die in peace, she was Commander Shepard and she tried to order them to stop, but the only thing that came from her throat was cracked whimpers of pain.

She was placed on – something. A makeshift stretcher, part of her mind supplied, part of her mind that was still intact and able to ignore the pain. Then one of the soldiers carrying her stumbled and she tried to reach out to catch herself – only to pass out from the pain of it.

She took a breath. Regained consciousness.

She was somewhere new, now. Familiar, but different. Last time, she'd woken up in a brightly-lit medical lab. A Cerberus lab, with Miranda's voice in her ear. Now she was in a dirty, dingy field hospital tent, the old-fashioned canvas swaying lightly above her head.

“Nelson, you miscalculated the sedative,” an unfamiliar voice chided, and she wanted to jump to the poor nurse's defense - _it's not their fault, I've got all these cybernetic implants, you see, from the last time I died..._

But the pain was too much, she couldn't speak. Instead, she glanced at the doctor's careworn face as he administered another dose.

Part of her hoped she wouldn't wake up again.

\-------

Fate, or whatever the hell the universe liked to throw at her, must've had other plans, because she woke again, and this time, the doctor was looking at her carefully.

“Commander,” he said, his voice low and calm. “Glad to see you back with us.”

“I -” She opened her mouth to try and say something, to thank him for whatever he'd done (because Shepard was nothing if not polite when people brought her back from the dead), but the sound that came out was strangled at best.

“Here, drink this.”

He gently put a straw to her lips and she managed to drink, cool water soothing her dry throat and she thought about another lifetime, a friend and an _emergency induction port_ , and, absurdly, almost laughed.

That would've ruined her stoic patient routine in a heartbeat.

Still, if she was here, and apparently had the use of her voice back, she might as well ask the burning question. “What happened?”

The doctor shook his head a little. “You would know that far better than me. When that Reaper showed up, everyone assumed you were a goner. But that ship of yours defied the order to retreat and took it down. Next thing we knew...” He was saying something about a pulse emitting from the Crucible, about Reapers being disabled, mass relays going dormant, about how it had worked, all worked.

And all Shepard could remember was the face of a little boy, telling her to choose. The feel of the gun in her hand, the sudden overwhelming rage as she fired – rage at the boy, for the absurd choice; rage at herself, for not having foreseen it; rage at the universe for taking everything she cared about. Every _one_.

“Commander?”

She looked at the doctor, trying to push away the memories, the doubts. “Where is my ship? My crew. The Normandy...”

He shook his head. “There's still a battle going on, Commander. We've tried to hail her, but no word yet.”

“Thank you,” she said.

When he left, she drifted to sleep thinking about that damn bar in the sky, wondering if Garrus was there waiting for her.

\-------

The final diagnosis was a concussion, four broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, a broken leg, several broken fingers and toes, more contusions than anyone cared to count, and an outrageous amount of blood loss.

The shortage of medi-gel in the field meant that it would be a few weeks before she was ready to even walk around unaided again, let alone kick some more Reaper ass.

Not that she had much desire to do anymore of that.

Above Earth, the battle raged for two days. In the rubble and wreckage of London, Shepard fought a fever and tried to make sense of what had happened, and how different it was from what she remembered. 

\-------

“She's got a lot of injuries, and she's still a little feverish, it may not be a good idea-”

“Screw that. I should've been here days ago. Just try to stop me.”

The voice was impossible. Then again, most of what had happened since she'd been pulled from that rubble had felt rather impossible. 

A warm hand wrapped around hers, three fingers she knew almost as well as her own five. She blinked blearily at that familiar, scarred face. 

“The hell have you been, Vakarian?” she said, her voice sounding rough and cracked to her own ears. 

He had the grace to look mildly abashed, at least. “We – I – didn't...” 

Shepard nodded. “I thought I was dead, too.”

“I won't be leaving again,” Garrus murmured, and she fell back to sleep with those words in her ears.

\-------

Her fever broke, and the battle was more or less done. From what Shepard could piece together, the Crucible had done to every Reaper more or less what she'd done to Sovereign when she'd killed Saren. With their defenses disabled, the allied forces had a much easier time fighting them. There were still heavy losses, but the tide had most definitely been turned.

Whatever Shepard had seen and heard from the child on what she'd thought had been the Citadel, had been some kind of dream. Or hallucination. EDI, the Geth, they were all fine. The mass relays had been knocked offline, but not destroyed. It would be a matter of weeks, maybe months, to get them all working again. 

Rebuilding, however, would take much longer than that.

\-------

“You should go to Palaven,” she said, the day the connection was re-established.

Garrus nodded. “I will. With you, when you're ready.”

“We don't both have to sit here and watch other people do all the work.” Shepard had been irritable. She was frustrated, at her body, for taking so long to get well, at the doctors who couldn't just magically fix her, at Garrus for being there all the damn time, at Garrus when he _wasn't_ there, at all the people who still needed her help, at the Reapers and just _everything_.

“Primarch Victus has things well in hand. Besides, I already told my father the next time I see him I'll be introducing him to Commander Shepard.”

The pride and affection in his voice made her feel guilty. “I hope I can live up to the hype.”

He gripped her hand in both of his. “You never disappoint.”

\-------

She felt like she was doing okay, until the day they had a memorial service for Anderson. Someone had found some dress blues that almost-sorta fit her, and she was able to stand on her own at least, to give a last salute to her mentor, the man she'd been proud to count a friend. 

Afterwards, she went back to the makeshift bunker she'd been calling home, and cried. She was ashamed – not of her grief, but of the part of herself that wished she'd followed Anderson into the void that day. The part of herself that wished she'd died with him, and all the others.

\-------

Every night, she had nightmares. Every night, she woke up shaking, weeping, terrified. Every night, Garrus held her close, not speaking, not asking anything of her. She would go back to sleep with his heartbeat, his steady breathing in her ears. 

\-------

It was six weeks, six agonizing weeks, before the field doctor declared her space-worthy again. Most of the mass relays had been reactivated, and while the Reapers had been effectively defeated, there were still pockets of heavy fighting in remoter corners of the galaxy, particularly the terminus systems. 

Shepard set foot back on the Normandy for the first time since her return to Earth – she could've visited during her recovery, but it would only have made her more frustrated.

At least the fish and her hamster had managed to stay alive, she found herself thinking as she stepped into her cabin. The restless itch that had been lurking just under the surface of her skin since first waking up began to subside almost immediately in the familiar surroundings, the low hum of the eezo core wrapping her up like a much-loved blanket.

Hackett had informed her in no uncertain terms that the trip to Palaven was just the first leg of what was going to be a kind of victory tour of the galaxy. Shepard would be expected to attend memorials on most of the major homeworlds, maybe make a few speeches, do some token cleaning up to bolster morale, that kind of thing.

She was still Alliance, for the moment, and she was desperate to be back in space, so she hadn't argued about it.

She had managed to turn down his offer of a promotion to rear admiral, though. 

\-------

That first night back on board, Garrus showed up at her cabin with a bottle of wine in his hand. It made her smile, something she really hadn't done much of lately, as she tugged him inside. She placed the bottle carefully on the table in her sitting area. “There's only one thing I want tonight,” she murmured, and when he gripped her hips, her skin tingled.

It might seem weird, to an outsider – though really, even sex with another human was always a lot weirder than the vids made it look. When his mandibles fluttered against the inside of her thighs, she shuddered and gripped his shoulders; when she straddled him, he made a sound that was half-purr and half-growl; as he entered her, their bodies moving together and finding a rhythm, Shepard felt genuinely glad to be alive for the first time since she woke up in the rubble of London.

\-------

She could tell he was getting close to sleep, his hand tracing lazy patterns on her lower back, his breathing evening out. Shepard sighed.

“Why don't you tell me what's bothering you?” Garrus asked, his voice low and quiet.

“I don't...” She trailed off, trying to find the words. Garrus' hand stopped moving. “I feel lost,” she finally admitted. “I mean... what do I do now?”

The hand on her lower back began working its way up her spine gently. “Whatever you want.”

She thought about that for a while. Thought about the first twenty-nine years of her life, how everything had been so cut-and-dried then. And then she thought about the three years since Eden Prime. Saren, and the Reapers. Cerberus and the Illusive Man. Everything that had consumed her life. She'd taken what little happiness she could, when she could get it, but what she really _wanted_ had never factored in. She thought about that conversation with Garrus, before the battle in London. She'd been willing to entertain any kind of rosy fantasy in the lead-up to a march into the jaws of hell, but now that they were on the other side, everything looked very different.

“I don't know what I want,” she said.

Garrus held her close, breathing in the scent of her hair. “That's okay. There's plenty of time to figure it out.”

“Together? I might need your help.”

He let out a long, slow breath. “Of course. Always.”


End file.
